I’d been going through the papers as I listened to her. “These are his phone bills?”
“For the last six months. Service was in his name. An unlisted number.”
A fair number of the calls were to Portola Valley — the judge
— and even a couple to my apartment. It was odd to see my phone number there and I wondered if anyone else had obtained these records. And then I noticed a number of calls made to Napa. I asked Terry about them.
“They were made to a private mental institution called Silverwood. You know anything about that?”
“His father is a patient there,” I replied, writing the number down. I came to the last page. “I thought there’d be more.”
“So did I. I get the feeling he was deliberately lying low.” I nodded agreement. She took out a bundle of papers from the folder and pushed them across to me. “I had better luck with the grandmother and uncle,” she said. I had asked her to find out what she could about the car crash which had killed Hugh’s grandmother, Christina, and his uncle, Jeremy, twenty years earlier. Hugh had maintained that his grandfather was responsible for those deaths.
Terry had obtained copies of the accident report prepared by the CHP, written within a couple of hours of the collision. She had also gotten the coroner’s findings based on an inquest held in San Francisco three days after the accident.
The CHP concluded that the car, driven by Jeremy Paris, had been headed east into Nevada on highway 80 at the time of the crash. It was dusk, a few days before Thanksgiving, the road was icy, traffic was light and there had been a snowstorm earlier in the week. The Paris car had been in the far left lane, nearest the center divider, a metal railing about four feet high. There was reason to believe that Jeremy Paris had been speeding.
About twenty miles outside of Truckee, disaster overcame the Parises. Their car suddenly went through the center divider, skidded off the side of the road across four lanes of westbound traffic, nearly hit a westbound car, and plunged off the road where its fall was broken by a stand of trees. Within a matter of moments, the car burst into flames. Christina Paris was dead when the police got to her, having been summoned by the driver of the car who had narrowly avoided being struck by the Paris car. Jeremy Paris died in the ambulance.
The driver of the other car, Warren Hansen, was the only witness and had provided details of the accident to the police. Hansen had been returning home to Sacramento from a week’s skiing. He, the report noted in cop talk, was HBD — had been drinking, shorthand for drunk. Hansen claimed that the Paris car was going too fast for the road and that it appeared to be followed by another car, tailing it from the next lane over. He remembered that the second car was dark and its lights were off. He said that just before the accident the dark car had been striking against the back bumper of the Paris car.
All these statements were duly noted by the cop who took the report. They were then dismissed by the sergeant who signed off on the report and who remarked that Hansen was drunk and further disoriented by the shock of nearly having been in a serious collision. The sergeant concluded that Jeremy Paris had simply lost control of his car as he sped down the icy roads at dusk, the most treacherous hour for motorists. It was plausible. I could almost hear the sergeant sighing with relief as he filed the report; another mess averted.
I turned to the coroner’s report. Sitting without a jury, he accepted the findings of the CHP as to the circumstances of the accident, based upon the brief testimony of a single witness, the sergeant. He added some information from the autopsies; charred meat is essentially all that had been left of Christina and Jeremy Paris. Finally, he fixed the times of their deaths. According to the coroner, given the circumstances of the accident and the conditions of the bodies, the deaths could be characterized as essentially simultaneous. When I came upon that phrase, simultaneous death, something clicked in the back of my mind.
I went on to the next page. It was a death certificate, made out for Warren Hansen who died on April 27, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Six months after the accident. I looked up at Terry.
“Up to this,” I said, holding the death certificate, “I could almost believe it was just an accident.”
“Me, too,” she said. “But as soon as I got it, all the loose ends unraveled again.” She explained that it made no sense to hold the inquest without calling the only eye-witness to the accident, or the paramedics who brought the bodies up from the crash and who could have testified to the times of death. “But then,” she continued, “it dawned on me that that was the whole reason for the inquest. To set the times of death. There’s no other reason to hold a coroner’s inquest for a simple car accident. They don’t usually call the coroner unless there’s some question about the deaths.”
“But there wasn’t any question here,” I said. “And certainly no reason to hold the inquest hundreds of miles from where the accident occurred and three days afterwards. The only difference between the police report and the coroner’s inquest were the times of death. Someone wasn’t happy with the fact that Jeremy Paris was still alive when they pulled him from the car.”
“Naturally,” she said, “I thought it was the judge who requested the coroner but I was wrong. It was John Smith, Christina’s brother, who arranged it.”
I thought for a moment. “Well, maybe he suspected,” I replied, “and wanted a coroner’s independent examination of the accident.”
Terry laughed derisively.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s not what Smith got,” she said. “The examining coroner was Tom Fierro. Do you know about him?” I shook my head. “He’s the guy they discovered with the suitcases of money under his bed. My dad used to talk about him and said that Tom was everyone’s favorite coroner. When you bought him, he stayed bought.”
“Do you think he was paid off?”
She sighed eloquently. “Of course I do, but who am I going to ask about it?” She gathered up the papers and stacked them neatly. “What’s our next move?”
“All this means something,” I mused, “and if I just sat still long enough it would come to me. But I can’t sit still. These calls to Napa,” I said, lifting the phone bills. “Maybe Hugh said something to his father that could help us. That’s where I’m going. You work on finding out more about John Smith. He may hold the key.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “I think there are too many doors for just one key. Stay in touch.”
The street sign was so discreetly placed that I missed it the first time and drove on until I found myself at a dead end. I turned around and drove slowly until I saw that the narrow opening between clumps of dusty bushes was, in fact, a road; a back road off a back road at the edge of Napa’s suburban sprawl.
It was one of those luminescent autumn days. The sky was radiantly blue and the air was warm and sultry. You drank rather than breathed it. At my right, a white picket fence appeared and beyond it, orchards and pasture. These gave way to a large, formal lawn, arbors, tennis courts, and a rose garden, looking for all the world like the grounds of a country club.
Only there was no one around.
I looked over to my left and saw a white antebellum mansion shimmering like a mirage in the heat of the day. Smaller bungalows surrounded it at a respectful distance, each in the shade of its own great oak. One or two people moved slowly down a walk between the big house and one of the smaller ones. I turned into a circular driveway and drove up to a parking lot at the side of the house. I got out of my car and went up the steps of the great house, crossed the veranda and touched the doorbell.